customers
2017/04/03
 
3 Apr, 2017 | 3 min read

West Interactive: Using WSO2 Identity Server to Enhance Customer Experience

  • Samudra Weerasinghe
  • Senior Lead Marketing Officer - WSO2

Headquartered in Omaha, West Corporation is all about telecommunication - be it conferencing solutions, safety services, interactive voice response solutions or speech application automation. Pranav Patel, the vice president of systems development at West Interactive, recently spoke at WSO2Con USA 2017 about the unique customer experience they offer through their multi-tenanted role-based identity and access management solution built using WSO2 Identity Server.

An increasing numbers of users today are turning to various different channels like the web, mobile devices, and social media to interact with vendors. Pranav explained that knowing the customer and making sure that they can access West Interactive’s services from whichever channel they prefer is a key requirement for them.

West has been in the telecommunication industry for the last 30 years, and quite commonly, have many solutions that are siloed and distributed. Connecting all these solutions was a major challenge they needed to overcome in order to provide a holistic experience to their customers, explained Pranav. This meant dealing with and managing various different identities that belonged to many different customer portals. They needed to create a solution that revolves around centralizing user identities to a single user portal and creating an efficient identity and access management system.

Pranav then examined the requirements they needed to meet in order to achieve operational efficiency, easily manage accounts, save costs, and provide great customer experience. Other than the evident single sign-on and federation requirements, multitenancy with hierarchical tenant management was an important feature that enabled them to serve all their tenants (a client of West represented as a domain in the system) and users (individuals that require access to the portal and are grouped at the tenant level) through their portal. The system also needed to enforce rule-based access control that allows access to certain products (web applications that need to be integrated) depending on who the user is. In addition to this, they had corporate policy requirements for passwords, needed to maintain password history and had a password expiry date that prompted users to frequently change the password. Audit logging and user bulk imports were some other requirements.

“WSO2 fulfilled several of our requirements out-of-the-box, especially support for various protocols and heterogeneous multiple user stores,” observed Pranav. He went on to explain that they could easily extend the product and customize it for any features that it didn’t already have, making it the perfect solution for West.

WSO2 Identity Server is used for

  • Introducing a relationship hierarchy between the parent tenant and child subtenant and allowing multi-tenancy
  • Asking for and storing answers to five security questions per user
  • Defining permissions or roles for products (web applications) and users
  • Providing single sign-on and federation for users
  • Allowing employees to mimic a user and see how they perceive the user portal
  • Enforcing password policies set by tenants

Pranav expressed how WSO2 Identity Server meets all their current requirements and how they would like to introduce customizable login pages (by tenant), two-factor and multi-factor authentication, automated user provisioning and self-registration among other features in the future. He concluded by saying they were looking forward to adding WSO2 Data Analytics Server to the mix in order to monitor what’s really going on in the system.

To learn more about West Interactive’s story listen to Pranav’s talk at WSO2Con USA 2017.

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